I heard from someone this past week that Scanners used to listen to Railroad Frequencies, Dispatchers, Detectors, etc, will be going Digital by the end of this year of 2010 and the Scanner you have will be worthless. My question is, Is this true or not?
There is that possibility. Most of the locomotive RR radios in use right now are digital capable.
The timeframe may or may not be accurate, but going digital is probably a given.
Right when I got my system figured out and maximized!
I am currently hearing so much railroad chatter that I tune it out.
Ed
I guess its possible. Haven’t heard much about it though. It would be a pretty costly change. There are scanners that can pick up digital transmission, but they are a bit more expensive.
Keith
While I don’t actually know anything, I’ve been holding off on making a new scanner purchase as I had heard similar rumors.
The Federal Communications Commission has been studying Railroad Communications systems since 2002, and if they mandate a switch to digital to free up some of the frequency spectrum, the railroads will have no choice in the matter.
http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-225008A1.pdf
Digital and narrowbanding are two different issues, albeit inter-related.
All users in the VHF-High band (148-174 MHz) are mandated to go “narrowband” by 2013, no matter if it is analog (like current RR Radio) or digital. Additional RR channels have already been identified “in between” the existing channels. RR Radio will go from ~100 channels to ~200.
Going digital allows slightly better use of those narrower channels. For scanning enthusiasts, this has two results.
First, of course, is that we’ll need digital capable scanners. They’re still a bit pricey, but volume usually forces that down over time.
Second is that digital has a phenomenon referred to as the “digital cliff.” While analog tends to fade off, resulting is communications you can still decipher through the noise, digital is either there, or it isn’t. For a brief period you may get the “R2D2 effect,” but after that it’ll be silence.
Another consideration is what type of digital they go to. There are a couple, anyhow.
I have to make a point about the so-called “digital cliff.” Most of these digital radio standards have several ways they solve interference problems: convolutional coding and interleaving combined with forward error correction.
The thing is, an equivalent analog signal that would normally have static on it can still carry an intelligible digital signal. Furthermore, the digital systems allow more than one carrier on a channel and some use frequency hopping.
In any event the big panic right now is for narrowband FM channels.
This is a highly overrated topic. Most scanners are narrow band already. The spacing between channels had been 25 Khz and will now be 12.5 Khz. Most scanners can be set to center frequencies every 12.5 Khz by adjusting the “step” parameter. For most of you it won’t make a difference. In all but the most congested areas the major channels (presently used) will remain the same. Most “narrow band” FM scanners are only 5-7 Khz wide anyway and will not hear the adjacent channel that is 12.5 Khz away. For scanning, you will have to set your “step” to 12.5 Khz and watch for new assigned channels coming up in the next few years.
For those of you with ham radios that receive in the railroad band (perfectly legally!), most radios have 12.5 Khz step and 7 to 5 Khz width already. For those of you that don’t have ham licenses, it is very easy to study and pass the Technician exam (no morse code) and get a license. Use your hand held radio to talk to other hams on 146.49 Mhz (railroad fan frequency) and listen to the railroads on the same radio as a bonus. (Ham transmitters don’t transmit on the railroad frequencies.) Some ham transceivers are as inexpensive as $150 and very durable.
As mentioned above, the FCC has mandated that all VHF (public safety and business as well) go to narrowband (12.5 KHz channel spacing) by 2013. However, there is no mandate to go digital. There is talk in the future that the FCC may mandate a further narrowbanding (down to 6.25 KHz), but there is no hard date given for that (i’ve seen 2018, but that is really just speculation.) Right now, the only way to get 6.25 KHz channel spacing is to go digital, since the radios available now can’t effectively do 6.25 KHz in analog moduation. Some salesmen have been pushing digital capable radios in order to “be ready for 6.25 Khz when it comes” or implying that digital is required in 2013 when it is not. Remember that digital radios have a higher price tag than narrowband capable analog radios…
IIRC, the AAR set a mandate that the locomotives used in interchange use narrowband radios by this summer (I think 1 July.) I’d have to go back and check. In fact, your local railroad may already be using narrowband - if you hear a transmission with a lower volume than the others, its probably transmitted narrowband.
One thing to watch, though, is digital, since the format that the railroads would be using is NXDN not APCO Project-25. The digital scanners on the market today only demodulate APCO Project-25 digital. Right now, there is no scanner that will receive NXDN, and no word when one will be available (or even if it is possible to produce one.) CSX, for example, has been buying and issuing Kenwood NX series handhelds. With 512 available channels in multiple banks, CSX has been programming 1 set of wideband analog AAR frequencies, one set of narrowband analog AAR frequencies and one set of NXDN digital AAR frequencies. The silver lining is that you can buy a Kenwood NX series radio and have it programmed to receive only, or buy the software and program
Also, if your local railroad goes analog narrowband on the existing 97 AAR frequencies, you will still be able to hear the transmissions, although they won’t sound as loud. When the railroads start using the newer narrowband channels (AAR 107-197), many scanners and VHF radios won’t be able to program in the exact frequency. You may be able to program in a close frequency and still listen, though.
Right now Railroad Comm people are working on PTC which will likely delay anything more than the mandated narrowbanding. The need for 220MHz radios for PTC will eat up the budgets.
The Big 4 railroads bought the rights to the 220 MHz spectrum because it is close to the existing voice channels allowing them to use the existing towers for the PTC data transmissions.
So are there any radios/scanners capable both analog and digital?
Same question and will the digital radios/scanners be capable of both formats?
Are the voice bands really congested enough to use digital? With subcodes and subaudible signalling the telemetry is already available on the voice bands. Usually the idea of using digital is to relieve congestion, not to add telemetry.
I appologize for taking so long to respond back. This is the first time i’ve been able to go through this forum in a week.
Yes, right now Kenwood and ICOM are making both commerical mobile and handheld radios that are capable of both analog (wide and narrow) and NXDN modulation. The model numbers of the Kenwood radios are NX-200 and NX-700. You can see them at http://nexedge.kenwood.com/products.html . I’m not sure what the ICOM model numbers are, since i’m a Kenwood fan 
Unfortunately, there are no scanners right now that will demodulate NXDN digital, although with quite a few public safety organizations going NXDN, it may be available in the next generation of scanners. It all depends on whether or not Kenwood and ICOM will allow NXDN to be licensed to scanner manufacturers. Since there isn’t a scanner that can demodulate it, it is being used as “poor man’s encryption” by several users.
The scanners that are available today will let you listen to both APCO Project-25 digital transmissions (used by the federal government and many public safety agencies) and analog transmissions. GRE, Radio Shack and Uniden all carry those scanners.
Warren
The problem, if the Railroads go digital, is a little more complicated than you might think. The digital format that they are required to use is 6.25, and there are no scanners presently manufactured that will receive this format. Regular digital scanners will not work.